The Wine In Your Glass Was Farmed

In California, Sonoma’s Littorai Wines and Bedrock Wine Co. believe that winemakers can, and should, do more for the environment.

- CHEK WONG

In coastal Sonoma, winemaker Ted Lemon and his workers are huddled around a barrel as they drain its contents, separating the wine from sediments that have settled at the bottom. It is a labour-intensive and time-consuming task, and in the unheated winery, their exhaled breath is visible on this rainy winter morning. While most winemakers use pumps to aid in the process, Lemon adopts an old-school approach known as esquive, a gentler process where the wine is drained via gravity flow. It is a throwback to his time working in Burgundy in the early 1980s, where he learnt the traditional ways of winemaking at the region’s top domaines.

Lemon is the founder of Littorai Wines, one of the most feted wineries in California. Wine critic Antonio Galloni describes his range of single-vineyard pinots and chardonnays as “essays into the great terroirs of the Sonoma Coast and Anderson Valley”. From inception, Littorai’s wines have stood out for their elegance and fineboned structure, a style markedly at odds with the fruit-forward, high-alcohol wines that were in vogue.

Having begun to question conventional methods of farming and their effects on the long-term health of soil in the late 1990s, Lemon dared to walk his own path.

“I had just gotten to the point where I felt like a hamster on a wheel going around and around,” he tells me. “My question to myself was: What does nature know that I don’t know? The forest is self-sustaining. I felt that mineral fertilisation was an inadequate explanation for how and why plants grow and reproduce.”